Brain Inspired

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he Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.

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Check out this story: Beyond the algorithmic oracle: Rethinking machine learning in behavioral neuroscience

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Neuroscience studies in part the relation between brain activity and behaviors. But, what is a behavior? It's a simple question, but there's no simple answer. For example, you're behaving right now, whatever you're doing, even if you're not doing much. When you cross the street, how many behaviors do you use? When you sleep, what behaviors do you do? Hopefully these simple examples make you think about how difficult it can be call some single movement a behavior.

Nedah Nemati is a philosopher of neuroscience at Columbia University. I met Nedah at a workshop a few months ago, where we chatted about the growing trend in neuroscience toward what is sometimes being called "naturalistic neuroscience," which really means varying levels of allowing organisms to behave more freely, less constrained, than traditional neuroscience experiments that seek to minimize unrelated to the behavior or cognition you want to isolate to study and explain. In more extreme cases, researches will try in the lab to emulate as much as possible the ecological world a particular organism has evolved to exist in, or even perform the experiments out of the lab, in the wild, so to speak. So a good part of our discussion revolves around this trend, and what counts as a "naturalistic" behavior, and how the tools we use to perform experiments shape the experiments and the scientific questions themselves.

Nedah has a neuroscience background, but in her philosophical work she has embedded herself into various neuroscience labs to better understand how the experiences of the researchers themselves, called their lived experiences, shape the assumptions and questions in their science. As an example, we discuss her work looking into the neuroscience of sleep from over a 100 years ago to today. When a modern neuroscientist studies sleep, are they studying the same thing a scientist claimed to be studying 100 years ago, even though they claimed to be studying sleep back then as well?

Nedah's website.

Transmitter piece:

Beyond the algorithmic oracle: Rethinking machine learning in behavioral neuroscience

Related papers

Rethinking Neuroscientific Methodology: Lived Experience in Behavioral Studies

What is ‘Natural’ about Naturalistic Neuroscience?

0:00 - Intro
5:00 - Philosopher in a lab
20:21 - Sleep as behavior
22:22 - How the study of "sleep" has changed
27:24 - How tools and methods shape definitions
46:07 - Naturalistic neuroscience
1:00:47 - Naturalistic vs experimental
1:14:32 - How tools change theory
1:16:57 - Lived experience
1:26:28 - Lived experience vs. bias
1:37:09 - AI and engineering in neuroscience
1:45:29 - Should a lab hire a philosopher?

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James Harrison is a clinical hypnotist, and author of a new book, Mental Foraging and the Evolution of Memory: An Updated Model of Clinical Hypnosis. As you probably know, hypnosis carries some historical baggage, for example, in terms of how it could be used to manipulate people into having false memories that could be damaging to themselves and those around them. That baggage carries over into modern medical and clinical practice, with many people giving the side eye to hypnosis and disregarding it as a useful tool in the toolkit of treating patients with mental disorders or psychological distress. As a clinician, and as someone who has seen clinical hypnosis work for people, James set about exploring how it might be explained in modern neuroscience terms and concepts. What he ended up with is an account of hypnosis grounded in the neuroscience of state changes, interoception, exteroception, and predictive processing. His hope is that if we get the scientific explanation right of how it works, hypnosis might become more accepted as an effective tool among other psychological treatments.
James's website.

Mental Foraging and the Evolution of Memory: An Updated Model of Clinical Hypnosis.

@JamesMHarrison_

0:00 - Intro
4:23 - Why the book?
15:21 - Hypnosis as mental foraging
21:57 - Freud's unconscious
23:51 - How it all works
30:27 - Memory reconsolidation
36:41 - Historical rejection of hypnosis
48:44 - Old practice, new explanations
51:55 - Clinician is a guide
1:07:31 - Effectiveness
1:22:22 - Aristotle's common sense
1:30:47 - Allostasis and predictive processing

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The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.

Read more about our partnership.

Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released.

To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org.

Ehud Ahissar runs the Ahissar Lab at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, where he studies the neuronal and behavioral mechanisms of perception. Ehud sees perception as a closed-loop process, in which organisms actively generate the sensory signals they interpret. Today, we discuss his development of an idea about how this kind of processing can account for our conscious experience. It's a type of dualism Ehud calls "perceptual dualism," different than the dualisms you may already know. I'll use his own words to summarize it here…

"The idea is that humans inevitably experience the world through two fundamentally different modes: digital brain–brain (BB) communication and analog brain–world (BW) interaction. In this view, the mind, and consciousness, emerge as social-like phenomena (in the philosophical sense), grounded in BB communication while constrained by BW interaction."

Take note of the term brain-brain, shortened as BB, and the term brain-world, shortened as BW, because throughout our discussion you'll often hear just BB and BW to refer to those two distinct domains.

So we discuss the ins and outs of his ideas, how came to them via studying active sensing in rodent whisker neurophysiology, how the brain implements this dualism via nested loops of neural circuitry that oppose and interlace with each other at multiple levels, and the idea that attractors, in the dynamical systems sense of attractor, may be the corresponding brain signatures of the digital phenomena that belong to the brain-brain mode of cognition.

Ahissar Lab

@ehudahissar; @ehudahissar.bsky.social

Related papers

Digital–Analog Perceptual Duality

Closed-loop perception: gaps between artificial intelligence and biology

Read the transcript.

0:00 - Intro
5:09 - A new kind of dualism
7:19 - Ehud's whiskers background
14:10 - Digital-analog perceptual dualism
26:08 - Digital communication between humans
32:26 - Attractors as the digital-analog interface
39:50 - Consciousness
50:11 - Dynamics and perceptual bottleneck
51:47 - Language, AI, and digital symbols
1:00:54 - Computation and brains (digital and analog)
1:06:43 - Improving AI with event based activation
1:11:10 - Dualism
1:17:26 - The hard problem of consciousness
1:21:26 - BB and BW interaction
1:24:55 - Tension between BB and BW
1:34:28 - Looking forward
1:37:37 - Srange loops

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.

The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.

Read more about our partnership.

Check out this story:

From genes to dynamics: Examining brain cell types in action may reveal the logic of brain function

Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released.

To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org.

Liset de la Prida is director of the Centro de Neurociencias Cajal in Madrid, Spain, where she runs the Laboratory of Neural Circuits. Today we discuss two main topics.

What drew me to invite Liset was her work on neural manifolds, which we've talked about a lot recently on this podcast. She studies how specific subtypes of neurons affect and control neural manifolds. More on that it in a second, because what drew her to study manifolds was her work on what are known as sharp wave ripples in the hippocampus. Sharp wave ripples are generally quick bursts of oscillatory activity as found in local field potential recordings that accompany little bursty sequences of action potentials fired off by sets of neurons. Those ripples have been associated with a quick replaying of some experience an organism has had, with the thinking that by replaying those sequences of neural activity associated with an event, it's helping to consolidate the memory for that event in the cortex. Like everything else, the story isn't so simple, and we talk about some of the findings that have added to the complexity of understanding what sharp wave ripples are doing, and the varieties of sharp wave ripples.

That varieties part is related to the second main thing we discuss, which is the varieties of neuron subtypes and their roles in shaping the manifolds we've discussed a lot recently. As a reminder, manifolds are dynamic structures along which populations of neural activity unfold over time, and they have proved to be one effective way of making sense of how large populations of neurons coordinate their activity to do useful things for our cognition. Liset is interested in the relation between sharp wave ripples and manifolds, and in how specific subtypes of neurons affect manifolds and cognition in general.

Neural Circuits Lab

@lmprida.bsky.social; @LMPrida

Book:

Brain, space and time: The neuroscience of how we navigate reality, memory, or the future

Related

From genes to dynamics: Examining brain cell types in action may reveal the logic of brain function

Cell-type-specific manifold analysis discloses independent geometric transformations in the hippocampal spatial code

From cell types to population dynamics: Making hippocampal manifolds physiologically interpretable

0:00 - Intro
5:29 - Hippocampus
9:31 - Sharp wave ripples
27:30 - Oscillations and epiphenomena
33:37 - Sharp wave ripples to manifolds
43:54 - Manifolds and single neuron types
49:45 - Hippocampus and granularity of cell types
59:23 - Explanation across levels
1:19:38 - Manifolds and higher cognition
1:29:46 - Brain Space and Time

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.

The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.

Read more about our partnership.

Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released.

To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org.

Brains encode information in representations that perform computations to make predictions, right? No, no, no, and no. That's Romain Brette's response to those ill-conceived notions that neuroscience relies on to try to explain how cognition works. He uses more words to do that in his new book, The Brain, in Theory, which we discuss today. In the book Romain breaks down how many of the common metaphors we use don’t withstand scrutiny, and he offers alternative approaches more in line with what we know about how biological entities work. Along those lines, we discuss his ongoing work understanding the cognition of a single celled organism, the paramecium, and what his views might mean for artificial intelligence. This is a long episode, but there's a lot more to be explored in the book, so I recommend you read it. If you're a patreon supporter, I coaxed Romain back on for another 45 minutes to go deeper on his thoughts about how anticipation is the core of cognition, how predictive processing accounts like active inference miss the mark, and a few other topics.

Romain's website.

The Brain, in Theory.

0:00 - Intro
4:01 - The Brain, In Theory
7:10 - Influences
13:11 - Process metaphysics
18:39 - Observer vs system perspective
21:24 - Information in the brain?
22:56 - Why this book?
29:52 - Computations in the brain
52:14 - Behavior is not a computation
1:07:20 - Paramecium cognition
1:22:02 - How should neuroscientists proceed?
1:29:09 - Cognition as collective behavior of autonomous cells
1:36:47 - Constraints, causes, and laws
1:52:36 - Hopes for the book to influence the field
1:55:04 - Thoughts about AI
2:02:13 - Computation and goals
2:08:17 - Anticipation vs prediction